Consistent tissue production quality and performance through Sam Operational Solution
As tissue manufacturers and converters face complex and mounting pressures to improve the sustainability of products and operations — while also ensuring quality and profitability — technology innovations that support and advance overall equipment efficiency (OEE) have become vital to success.
Factors such as raw materials price volatility, global competition, and the demand for product differentiation have only added complexity to the challenge.
Fortunately, automated solutions hold extraordinary potential to make the benefits of consistent quality and performance achievable for tissue converters, regardless of tissue converting equipment operators’ skill level.
Valmet’s Sam Operational Solution works as a virtual line supervisor to independently and continuously measure, monitor and adjust processes in real-time, based on tissue paper equipment generated data, including:
- Raw material characteristics
- Equipment performance measures
- Final product quality
Sam’s auto-regulation capabilities prevent deviations, interruptions, slowdowns, and substandard product quality, without relying solely on human operator skill.
How Sam can improve OEE
Acting as a virtual production supervisor, Sam Operational Solution monitors and makes adjustments to keep the production process under control and ensure optimal product quality without sacrificing line performance.
Sam performs reliable, real-time measurements; anticipates complex effects and potential outcomes; and automatically adjusts production patterns in-line to improve OEE at the system level. This active, automatic adjustment of production parameters can improve these performance and quality measures:
- Availability, to minimize equipment downtime
- Quality, for product that meets standards
Sam’s proactive process management and ability to foresee and identify production patterns also helps extend the life cycle of production equipment — all with minimal human intervention, increasing operator safety.
Sam makes informed decisions simpler and faster
By regularly and consistently measuring key characteristics at critical points along the production process and building an increasingly robust data archive, Sam eliminates the uncertainties of manual testing and subjective conclusions. This ensures simple, fast, and repeatable operations regardless of operator skill, all managed directly from the human machine interface (HMI) panel.
Sam helps reduce waste
Sam’s proactive production adjustments ensure product quality standards are met even as raw material characteristics, such as pulp quality, vary. But it does more than that: its real-time quality measurement can reduce waste at every operational step, helping manufacturers and converters more effectively use supply chains, better manage raw materials, optimize staffing, and streamline waste management.
Every roll or fold unit or system at every operational phase has the potential to incrementally improve a tissue converter’s OEE. Now, with the power to achieve monitoring and adjustment capabilities that reduce human error and deliver a new level of proactive production management, Valmet’s Sam Operational Solution puts even greater OEE within reach. Contact Valmet to learn more.